One of the fun things about Robert Caro's massively ambitious four-volume (so far) biography of Lyndon Johnson is the way the author invites readers to share in his obsession with our 36th president. Filtering vast research through a skilled, vivid narrative voice, Caro has spent 40 years on four volumes. The most recent of those, The Passage of Power, was released two weeks ago, and it finally makes a dent in Johnson's presidency; the second half of the book covers his first several weeks in office.

In the summer of 2002, I spent a week in the fresh mountain heat of Lake Tahoe but felt like I was actually in the dry vastness of Texas hill country. I was reading The Path to Power, the first volume of Caro's series. However, as far as the power and capacity of these books, being "transported" is only a fringe benefit. Caro's work goes beyond biography and reaches the highest level of literary achievement, superseding considerations of genre.

The task the author has set himself is to demonstrate avenues toward and the manipulation of political power in the United States. Lyndon Johnson is not simply a fascinating, contradictory personality whose life affords colorful anecdotes from the peaks and valleys of a political career; he is the embodiment of modern American political morality -- a master manipulator who achieved great heights before realizing the price of devious and precarious brinksmanship. Caro's books show that Johnson created the template of what we think of today as a consummate politician: ambitious, flawed, contradictory, and hard to love.

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For most of us, the inside of a jail or prison is a mythical, albeit unpleasant, holding ground for those deemed by the state unfit to coexist with the rest of society. What we never really know is what it's like to be inside: strip searches, gang fights, overcrowding to the point of suffocation -- that is, until local author Charles Shaw's Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality, which is released this week. The memoir tells the gruesome story of an inmate at Cook County Jail in Chicago -- a vast facility that holds nearly 10,000 inmates and has been home to figures such as mobster Al Capone and serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Shaw was convicted of possessing MDMA -- you might know it as ecstasy (and even after his third arrest, Shaw continues to think of it that way) -- and spent a year in the facility. Much of the book retells his experience from inside the walls of the jail, but the self-proclaimed drug activist does frequently plead his case to the reader -- that he was using ecstasy not recreationally, but as treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by cocaine addiction.

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Jason Doiy

The San Francisco Public Library's Park Branch

Jessa Crispin arrived at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia in March with high expectations. And by high, we mean abysmal.
 
"Secure in the knowledge that libraries are now permanently fucked," wrote the editor-in-Chief of the popular "litblog" Bookslut. Surely librarians would crumble before her, the harsh fiscal realities having reduced the bibliognosts into heaps of despair, wailing about furloughs and nonexistent arts grants.

But Crispin is not a librarian. Once a publishing outsider, she launched Bookslut in 2002 while working at a Planned Parenthood in Texas. She now enjoys insider status, and she contributes to likes of NPR, PBS, and the Washington Post on all things books. The conference falls within the realm of the "book world," so Crispin, donning black garb, traveled all the way from Berlin in search of heavyhearted roundtable discussions and forsaken vendor booths.

But the whole affair seemed rather ... hopeful. 

"I was not sensing any anxiety that day, and it was pissing me off," Crispin says.
 
So she offered bait. How many more budget cuts can libraries sustain? What about evil e-books?

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A sort of "autobiography as mixtape," Chloe Caldwell's Legs Get Led Astray is a slim, 157-page book of personal essays that are brooding with sex and longing and repetition. It's also full of music, with B-sides like Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Wilco, Rufus Wainwright, Tori Amos, and Okkervil River, whose lyrics in "Last Love Song For Now" are where Caldwell's title comes from.

The musical backbeat gives Legs a scratchy, ghostly quality. Part of this is also because, in several essays, Caldwell starts nearly every sentence with such phrases as "You had me..." "I wanted to..." "You have a girlfriend now, but..." which gives the book a peculiar cadence, as if it's a past life haunting itself.

The sadness undercuts most everything, whether she's writing about her mother, babysitting, or sucking cock. Sometimes the sadness is obvious, as in when she profiles a friend who committed suicide: "I don't know if I ever loved him. I just know that I wanted to be him. I just know that some days I want to drink a bottle of liquor and roll around on his grave." Sometimes it's less so, like when she's describing the aftermath of an orgy. "She saw I was awake and because she's my best friend she immediately saw I was depressed and told me not to get up. She told me to lie back down, and said, 'Just pretend you're on a magic carpet.' I pretended I was on a magic carpet, and for a moment, everything felt better."

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After reading celebraTORI, professional famous person Tori Spelling's 275-page Pinterest post about "unleashing your inner party planner to entertain friends and family," I am somewhat surprised to report that my inner party planner does, in fact, exist, and that it thinks party favors are the coolest.

But my snarky sense of skepticism also exists (and is decidedly healthier), and it smirks, rubs its fat hands together, and orders another whiskey on the rocks when it encounters suggestions such as, "You must have many desserts, and they must be displayed at all different heights."

Because let's face it: Tori is not a terribly sympathetic character. This is a woman whose tits have gotten more press time than most other architectural mishaps, from when her daddy first bought them in her 90210 days to the picture her husband Dean McDermott "accidentally" tweeted last November. She's also the kind of person who whines about an $800,000 inheritance, so perhaps it should be unsurprising that her money-saving tips include, "Sometimes it is just plain better, and sometimes even cheaper, to throw money at the problem." (Trying to sort out her logic actually gave me a tension headache.)

But hey, I needed an excuse to have my friends over, and for most people "come meet my cats and cuddle in the sun room" is not a good enough reason to make the trip across town. So I promised cocktails and appetizers, and then I set to prepping with celebraTORI as my guide.

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Who knew? A periodical called Sexoogy from the 1930s.

Are you afraid that people are judging your paltry, boring home library? You know those barren shelves need more of everything: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, magazines, and periodicals. But where can you find replenishments, volumes that might be rare and maybe even a little racy? Saturday marks the first Library Spring Smut Sale at the Center for Sex & Culture.

If you think the offerings consists of cast-offs, the likes of which you spot haphazardly displayed on someone's front steps or outside a BART station entrance, you're mistaken. The center's library boasts an impressive collection of mostly donated materials, and it seeks to maintain items shunned by traditional booksellers, libraries, and museums. Saturday you have the chance to look through items it chooses to sell.

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Hanne Blank

Be careful what you assume, and be careful what you consider "normal." So sings the perpetual chorus here in über-diverse San Francisco. As it should be. But there's a big assumption a lot of us probably have overlooked. It involves the heterosexual. It's not that "Some people aren't hetero," but rather, "Hetero hasn't been considered the norm -- or even a thing at all -- for very long." Author, historian, and lecturer Hanne Blank breaks it down in her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Blank shows how equating hetero with normal affects our laws, cultural institutions, scientific study, artistic expression, and ideas of love and romance. Underlying it all are assumptions about others -- and ourselves -- that most of us have never thought to even acknowledge.

She appears Tuesday (April 24) at Good Vibrations on Valencia. We spoke with her recently about her book.

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A hapless mouse is our everyman figure, and an antagonistic duck prone to bouts of rage shows up at inopportune moments to make demands and empty threats. There's also a dog -- a sweet-natured, loyal friend to the mouse. But despite the way it sounds, you can't expect anything cozy or familiar from Zak Sally's Sammy the Mouse.

Unlike the Disney-based templates upon which writer-artist Sally grafts his story, the world of Sammy the Mouse is far from a sunny or nostalgic daydream. It's a nightmarish, unpredictable horror show where a persistent but gentle God-like voice commands Sammy to his destiny while everyone else seems to harbor dangerous, unspeakable secrets.

Sammy the Mouse, Book 1, is a self-published collection of three issues put out in magazine form by Fantagraphics beginning in 2007. The book, personally printed by Sally and released by his La Mano outfit in Minneapolis, has a distinctive, inviting hand-crafted look and feel. The back flap disclaims that the author printed each copy on an AB Dick 9810 two-color offset press. The book's production and release was made possible by a Kickstarter campaign.

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Charlie Jane Anders

The big thing you need to know about the monthly series Writers with Drinks is this: Arrive super early, maybe even an hour before, for your chance at a stool or a booth. The Make Out Room is a pretty big space, but Saturday's installment still felt packed to a fire-hazard-y degree.

For good reason! As organized by Charlie Jane Anders, a writer and science-fiction nerd, five authors brought all the literary cred you'd want. With or without drinks, they read their work while most of the audience stood (and many others sprawled on the floor). Some were making out!

Overall, the evening's tone was a grab bag of comic-book geekery (Los Angeles' Sarah Kuhn), memories of a precocious childhood (local Glen David Gold), plain old storytelling (L.A.'s Amber Benson, who, from her three-season stretch acting on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, boasts a platinum-clad geek quotient), semi-erotic fiction (San Francisco's Malinda Lo), and fully erotic fiction (New York's Rachel Kramer Bussel).

A sex writer by profession, Bussel read her harrowing story of a woman who loves getting smacked by her lover. When the two end up doing it in an alley, one's panty-less-ness is revealed; things get drippy; Handi Wipes are proffered, "because she was a top who came prepared."

Whoa.

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Velo Steve / Flickr

See what we mean?

San Francisco bicyclists face constant battles. Rain. Hills. Rainy hills. Cars with outraged drivers. Jaywalkers wearing headphones. FiDi workers on cell phones. Agitated skateboarders. Overloaded bike racks. BART at rush hour. Muni, ever. Haight Street when the bars are open. Nineteenth Avenue when anything's open. Impatient and rude fellow bicyclists. Critical Mass. (Oh wait. Same thing.) Add it all up, and the stress seems to offset the benefits. Who'll show us a well-adjusted and tolerant way to navigate the ill-adjusted and intolerant masses? BikeSnobNYC, that's who. He'll be in San Francisco on Saturday at Rapha Cycle Club to lead us out of the darkness.

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